Bücher der Reihe TRANSitions / Transdisciplinary, Transmedial and Transnational Cultural Studies / Transdisziplinäre, transmediale und transnationale Studien zur Kultu

This book illustrates that the idea of a 'national' literature is profoundly problematic. Chapters on boundaries and crisscrossing show how a nation and its writers' works do not exist in isolation from their history. Stressing migration and (inter)cultural dialogue, authors explore how the characters in the texts establish a sense of belonging both within the context of migrations and within the context of Lithuania since its independence. The final series of essays in this book discuss Lithuanian literature abroad, that is, in translation.

These contributions offer fundamental insights into how literary works address and reconceptualize issues of nationalism, groupism, belonging and denationalization in selected European contexts. Various critical perspectives are employed here to highlight modern social and political processes as registered and, to a certain extent, also fashioned by contemporary literary discourses. 'Reimagined communities' emerge from literary redescriptions of existing or imaginary sociopolitical configurations in several European states or regions. All the contributions share a heightened sensitivity to the individual as enmeshed in oppressive geopolitical circumstances. Thereby, literary expressions of how individuality is constrained by social pressures may offer inspiring blueprints for emancipation.

One of the characteristic features of the linguistic situation of contemporary Iran is the coexistence of two standards of Modern Persian: the written and the spoken. While literature is generally composed in the written variety, the typically "spoken" forms are also to be found in the literary text. Modern spoken Persian in Contemporary Iranian Novels is a study of these. A scrutinous analysis of five carefully selected novels with methods drawing mostly from the register analysis seeks answers to questions such as: what features are characteristic to the spoken variety of language, how are they woven into the literary language, does the relationship between spoken and written registers change over time and how can this process affect the future development of Persian language?

Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with "The First Splendor" by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with "The Suspected Dybbuk" by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: "Tworki" by Marek Bienczyk and "Fly Trap Factory" by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.

In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird die Vielfalt von Sammlungsgefügen deutlich. Im Zentrum stehen Dokumente aus der Sammlung Varnhagen, die von bisher wenig beachteten Autorinnen stammen. Schriftstellerinen wie Charlotte von Ahlefeldt, Helmina von Chézy, Amalie von Imhoff, Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Karoline von Woltmann, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Amalie von Voigt und andere taten sich durch eine breite und vielfältige Wirkung im literarischen Feld hervor; als Schriftstellerinnen, Übersetzerinnen, Journalistinnen, Pädagoginnen etc. sowie als Vermittlerinnen zwischen Kulturen und Literaturen. Zu den archivierten Spuren dieser Tätigkeiten treten im Sammlungszusammenhang archivierende Spuren: Notizen, Dossiers, Vermerke. Diese poetologisch-ästhetischen, historischen und literaturgeschichtlichen Konstellationen werden durch digitale Editionen erschlossen und verknüpft, wobei sie ihrerseits diskursgestaltende Funktionen übernehmen.Female authors from the Varnhagen Collection such as Charlotte von Ahlefeldt, Helmina von Chézy, Amalie von Imhoff, Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Karoline von Woltmann, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Amalie von Voigt, and others distinguished themselves in the literary field by their broad and varied impact - being writers, translators, journalists, educators and functioning as mediators between different cultures and literatures. The archived traces of these activities are intertwined and extended in the collection by traces of archiving activities: notes, dossiers, annotations. These constellations can be made accessible and interconnected through digital editions, whereby they in turn take on a discourse-shaping function. This as well as the diversity of collection assemblages is elaborated in the broad range of contributions of the volume.